Mumbai: On July 25, a Nagpur sessions court issued notice to Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis to respond to a revision application filed by advocate and activist Satish Uke, alleging that Fadnavis had suppressed certain facts about pending criminal cases against him while filing his nomination papers for the 2009 assembly elections. Even before the notice could be served to the chief minister, the Economic Offence Wing of Nagpur police’s crime branch sprung into action and arrested Uke on August 1, in a 17-year-old case of alleged forgery and land grab.
Uke, his elder brother Pradeep and another person, Chandrashekar Mate, were booked under several unbailable sections of the Indian Penal Code for forgery, cheating and criminal conspiracy. The maximum sentence for these sections is life imprisonment. While Uke has been a practicing lawyer in Nagpur for over two decades, his brother Pradeep, a former policeman, has been dismissed from the police department.
A criminal case has been lodged in what appears to be a civil dispute, and instead of the local police, the EOW has been tasked with looking into the matter. The police, however, claim there is no political motivation behind this.
Uke is not new to controversies. He is known to take on the big and mighty, and fight legal battles right up till the Supreme Court. In 2009, Uke had filed a criminal application before the Nagpur additional chief judicial magistrate alleging that Fadnavis had ‘misled the people’ by concealing information about two pending criminal cases in the affidavit submitted along with his nomination papers. Uke had asked for criminal proceedings to be initiated against the chief minister. While the magistrate had rejected this application in 2014, Uke moved the higher court and managed to get a notice issued in the case.
In the past too, Uke has raised the issue of pending cases against Fadnavis. When one of the FIRs of 1992 registered against Fadnavis was quashed, Uke had appealed against it. He also accused judicial officers of supporting Fadnavis. This move had attracted contempt charges and in 2017, Uke was convicted for criminal contempt. He later moved the apex court challenging the order, but eventually rendered an apology to the high court and offered to withdraw his statements.
Most recently, Uke came into the limelight for his petition in the Bombay high court demanding compensation for the family of CBI Judge B.H. Loya, whose death has raised multiple questions. Uke had relied on documents obtained from government offices to argue that since Loya was travelling to Nagpur for government work on the day of his death, his family was eligible for compensation. His petition is yet to be admitted in the high court.
Given that Uke’s activism has been on full-swing, this sudden filing of an FIR against him and brother, that too in a 17-year-old case, raises a few doubts. According to police inspector Lalit Wartikar, the investigating officer in the land grab case, Uke along with the co-accused had forged the papers of land owned by one Aishwaryee Sahakari Gruh Nirman Sansthan. Wartikar claimed that over 1.5 acres of land worth Rs 5 crore was illegally acquired by the trio, and they had denied access to the real owners of the land. “They had trespassed into the land and used force against the owners each time they tried to access their property,” Wartikar told The Wire.
When asked why this case was handled by an EOW department of the crime branch and not a local police station, Wartikar said that the complainant had first approached the local police, who had not taken the case seriously. “The complainant Shobharani Nalode, who is the secretary of the housing society, had first approached the Ajani police station. But since the police did not act upon her case, we had to jump in.” The police has already recorded statements of a number of people related to the case. Nalode, along with three other plot holders, had earlier approached the special investigation team (SIT), formed to probe land grabbing cases under the crime branch, for intervention. The case was referred to the Ajni police station after the SIT was disbanded. Ajni police, according to Wartikar, had refused to intervene in the case, saying it was a civil one.
Wartikar denied that this case was politically motivated but did mention that Uke was a “famous man”. “He even attended a press conference organised by Kapil Sibal in Delhi,” he said, while speaking of Uke’s background.
In January this year, Uke had suddenly emerged at a press conference along with former Union minister and senior advocate Kapil Sibal in Delhi and had pointed at alleged discrepancies in the post-mortem report of Judge Loya. Sibal had also mentioned that Uke had told him about his interactions with Loya in October 2014 (Loya died on December 1 the same year) and that the judge was allegedly under extreme stress due to his ongoing assignment – conducting the trial in the alleged fake encounter of Sohrabuddin Shaikh.
Investigations in the forgery case against Uke are underway and the police on August 1 had sought 14 days remand for “further investigations”; they managed to get four days. The police, however, is not able to explain the delay in filing the case and why it was taken up at this point. “All this is a part of investigation. We will find out the motive and the accused role in the course of investigation,” Wartikar added.